Shadows House S1E12: "To Lord Grandfather's Wing"

Edward had a lot of plates to balance during his debut program. Not too easy, not too hard. Sabotage Kate-Emilico without being obvious to people not already part of his political faction. Put his well-researched soot power stimulation techniques into effect while still satisfying tradition. Get the debutants to think outside the box without teaching them to be too critical or independent-minded. He had to cut a lot of corners and make a lot of compromises, but in the end he succeeded at his primary objective. His techniques have been shown to work and will doubtless be used to inform future debut challenges, and he's gained politically for it.

However, the compromises that he made and corners that he cut still have consequences. One of those consequences is that every single one of the debutants fucking hates his guts.

John has already been brought onboard with Kate's subversive agenda, and Shaun de-sootified. The other two surviving debutant shadows can't be told the truth about Kate's situation, knowledge, and goals. They'd most likely turn her in without hesitation. The beauty of the situation, though, is that she doesn't have to sell them on overthrowing the Lord Grandfather and freeing the slaves. They'll help her with this rescue come nightfall, because Fuck Edward.

They don't like the idea of the asshole who ran their debut ceremony now being in charge of the entire children's wing. Now, by kidnapping one of their Faces without justification or explanation - and therefore most definitely without the sanction of Lord Grandfather or his lieutenants - he's made himself vulnerable. If they prove that he did this, then maybe they can be rid of him. That's worth taking some risks and breaking some rules for, from Patrick and Louise's perspectives.

It was Louise and/or Lou who happened to catch a glimpse of the suspiciously tall, lanky-looking veiled doll rolling a suspiciously Emilico-shaped object away on a cart last night in the first place, actually. The fact that she immediately went to Kate with this information is demonstrative.

Even though she can't even remember Emilico's name. She just saw and reported it as "he stole Kate's face."

To my pleasant surprise, everyone else - including Patrick - gives Louise a dirty look at this. John might have been changed by his early fixation on Kate and her anomalous behaviour, but Patrick's development also seems to have been taken off-script now. I think that this might actually be more a result of Emilico's behavior during the debut than direct influence from Kate. And also, perhaps, a result of Ricky being influenced by Emilico, Shaun, and John.

...

That's becoming a really strong theme in this series. The chaos theory of interpersonal influences, especially among those whose personalities are still developing. Which definitely is still playing into Hegelian thought, with the concept of a thing's identity being a product of tensions between opposing forces.

The young shadows and their amnesiac servants are almost like...double-children. So much cognitive capacity, with so little distinct personality and life experience. Every conversation they participate in, every outing they go on, every morning that they wake up on the right or wrong side of the bed, tugs one of the ropes hooked into their identities. For the human children, it's just catching up for lost time after losing their memories. For the uplifted morphs, it's even more fundamental; they're inherently imitative life forms, literal soot clouds ready to be blown in any direction and into any shape by even the lightest breeze.

The irony here is that the Lord Grandfather's authoritarian society is being undermined not because its youth are too wilful and strongminded, but because they're too suggestible. As soon as they're exposed to anything even slightly outside of the syllabus, it's potentially game over for their entire indoctrination process. Once again, the Shadows Family might be strong in terms of magical power and material resources, but it's also extremely brittle. A societal glass cannon.

Granted, the word "potentially" is important there. Louise, who was doing the best as a debutant and finding the most approval from the senior shadows, is by far the least inclined toward rebellion, only helping out here for purely selfish, intrigue-y reasons (she also, I think, has a pretty high chance of betraying them if convenient). The young shadows have defined enough personalities at this point for things like survivorship bias and privileged conservativism to start kicking in.

...

Anyway! They decide that if Edward is keeping his abduction of Emilico a secret, then he's probably holding her in his private quarters where discovery is least likely. The best way to get to those, of course, would be to use the same trick that Edward himself did and disguise themselves as veiled dolls. Getting ahold of some veil uniforms and preventing the real veiled dolls from reacting to their nonscheduled group is simple, due to a very disturbing new power that Louise casually reveals to the others.

She can, with scarcely more than a thought, control Lou's movements with perfect coordination and precision, as if her body was Louise' own. Presumably, this is the next step toward total integration and permanent parasitic inhabitation of the human template. On the bright side, she also has (somewhat more limited) control over other dolls as well, provided they have some measure of soot in their systems, so controlling and scattering the veiled ones as needed will be little trouble for her.

Yeah. Like I said, I have a feeling that Louise will end up betraying them.

The first hurdle they need to cross is a surprise visit from Barbara, the current prefect (or "starbearer") of the children's wing, and her face Barbie (the girl who I referred to as the kitchen kapo in earlier reviews). As it happens that they're meeting in Patrick's room, it's on Patrick and Ricky to meet Barbara at the door and shmooze her long enough for the others to hide and escape through the servant door.

Patrick, as you may recall, is (along with his servant Ricky) the manipulative one. Before and during the debut arc, this made him the most antagonistic of the young shadows. However, the fact that he felt the need to resort to so much skullduggery is a sign of how insecure and unsafe he feels in this (to his credit, legitimately not secure or safe) environment. Which seems to have given him a greater potential to be turned against the powers that be than the less hostile, but more satisfied with her place in the world, Louise. And, when it comes to deflecting the prefect's attention, Patrick's slimy social skills are extremely useful.

He not only manages to get Barbara-Barbie out of their hair, but even manages to trick her into revealing useful information. Specifically, that Edward's promotion to head of the childrearing department is a major political advancement for him, but that he's still chafing under the authority of the Lord Grandfather's high councilors. They already know that the adults' wing has three floors, with the least important shadows being housed on the ground floor and the most important ones on the top. They can now conclude that Edward has almost certainly just moved into a new set of second-floor quarters, which cuts down very considerably on how much ground they need to cover. So, well done Patrick!

After Barbara leaves and the others head out on their way, Patrick has a troubling conversation with Ricky. The latter is still under the effects of the coffee, and Patrick has been quietly, but increasingly, disturbed by how wooden and impersonal his companion has become (naturally, Kate and John didn't mention anything about the coffee or brainwashing to him or Louise). In particular, his lack of personal attachment to Emilico, who Ricky had very much gained a respect for after the debut, sets Patrick off.

And...when he snaps angrily at Ricky and yells at him to be his own person again the way he used to be, Ricky snaps out of it. No water-purging or mirror-match-beatdown required.

Shortly afterward, Lou recovers just from Louise saying something nice to her. Without the latter ever even acknowledging that her face had changed at all.

Weird, how each recovery seems to be exponentially easier than the one before it. Almost like recovery from the soot-jizz is contagious. Which would certainly be thematically appropriate, given everything else that's been going on between these characters, but I'd like to know the in-universe reason as well heh.

John-Shaun know from experience that some of the basement hallways and other little-used connections are booby trapped in charmingly Gygaxian fashion, so they take the main skyway to the adults' wing. Louise gets them the costumes and turns away the zombie guards, before returning to her own quarters with Lou; she wants Edward gone, but she doesn't want to put herself at risk. When Kate decides that too many searchers entering at once might be suspicious to chance passerby and that she should be the one to go in and search, John and Sean opt to stay near the entrance of the adults' wing to watch for signs of an alarm being raised.

Meanwhile, we have periodic cuts to Edward's quarters, where he - true to form - is getting comically frustrated as his attempts to interrogate Emilico continue to be utter failures.

He tries starving her. Which, uh. For one thing, torture doesn't work except in a very, very narrow set of circumstances where you can immediately verify the truth of anything the victim says, and these aren't them. For another thing, starvation takes at least a full day before it starts to get really agonizing, and Edward has only a limited time before the disappearance of Kate's face creates a stir and the head honchos start investigating. The guy is apparently good at morph developmental psychoplasticity, but kind of an idiot outside of that.

He has the sense to at least change his voice when interrogating Emilico. Apparently, that's a thing he can do, modulating his voice through a controlled layer of particulate soot. He can even do it well enough to mimic specific people's voices. But, like. He keeps her blindfolded and restrained throughout the process. He's able to prevent her from realizing who he is, but he completely fails to convince her that he's anyone who she can trust.

Her happy-go-lucky means of distracting herself from hunger and fear just confuse, infuriate, and frustrate him even further, and it's a delight to watch. Emilico also does a really good job at resisting interrogation while not betraying anything even remotely incriminating about Kate.

The script actually does something pretty delicate here, in the way it balances Emilico's lines. You legitimately can't tell if she's protecting Kate, or if she's being totally frank and Edward is just asking the wrong questions. For instance, he asks her things about what Kate's agenda is, who she's working for, what she's been commanding her face to do in secret, etc...but Kate hasn't actually told Emilico anything about her agenda or given her any incriminating orders yet. She's told Emilico things that neither of them are supposed to know, and expressed a hatred of the Lord Grandfather and his designs, but Edward never asks Emilico what Kate has disclosed to her or how Kate feels about things. Only what she's done and commanded. And, while Emilico has impressive powers of observation and deduction, she's also very guileless and silly in some ways, and it's entirely possible that she literally doesn't understand what her interrogator is trying to get at.

The ambiguity of what Emilico is thinking and what (if anything at all) she's trying to do is what makes these scenes truly shine.

When she speaks of Kate, Emilico says nothing except for how perfect, how kind, how graceful and powerful and poised her mistress is. Which not only tells Edward nothing, but also makes it seem like Emilico might still be under the effects of the second Grandpa Coffee dose for all Edward can tell. The thing is, while she might be deliberately trying to cultivate that impression to throw Edward further off, she might also be speaking completely, guilelessly truth about how she feels about Kate. Once again, the fact that Edward is persistently asking her the wrong questions makes it impossible to tell if she's intentionally trying to trick him or not.

Still, while it's amusing to watch, it's also making Emilico hungry, thirsty, exhausted, and frightened, so we should probably try and stop it. Fortunately, Emilico still has that little hand-sewn toy that contains some of Kate's suit within it on her, and Kate can cause it to move around and make noise by banging into things to give herself a direction to follow. She also, by lucky chance, happens to overhear Edward's pair of co-conspirators as they search for counter-infiltrators, and is able to avoid them before they see her.

UNluckily, though, Edward happens to be in the room when she makes the little toy shake around, and he hears and sees it. Realizing what's happening, he hides in the room and then ambushes Kate when she finds the right door and comes inside.

Granted, I'm not sure how much of a disadvantage Edward actually has Kate at. Even with Emilico tied up, Edward doesn't know just how much more powerful than she's supposed to be at this age Kate truly is. They're alone in the room together for now, without any backup. I'm not entirely sure that he could take her in a fight, especially if she strikes fast and hard before he can lose his overconfidence.

There's also another little complication. On her way to the room, the disguised Kate happened to wander through the hallway that leads to the brooding facility. Among the objects she briefly inspects before moving on is a large, coffin-like box that she determines doesn't have a person in it. When her back is turned though, we see that it DOES contain the latest bunch of wild morphs, freshly captured from the faerie wilds and awaiting their templates. One of them manages to slip free and starts surreptitiously following Kate.

What is this morph going to end up doing, during her confrontation with Edward? What will it see and see to imitate, from that engagement? I guess we'll find out next time.